Innovations in data communications technology, fueled by bandwidth-intensive applications, have led to a ten-fold improvement in networking hardware throughput occurring about every four years. These network performance improvements, which have increased from 10 Megabits per second (Mbps) to 100 Mbps, and now to 1-Gigabit per second (Gbps) and 10-Gbps and higher, have outpaced the capability of central processing units (CPUs). To compensate for this dilemma and to free up CPU resources to handle general computing tasks, offloading Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) functionality to dedicated network processing hardware is being utilized. TCP/IP chimney offload maximizes utilization of host CPU resources for application workloads, for example, on Gigabit and multi-Gigabit networks.
Converged network interface devices are generally utilized to integrate a plurality of different types of network traffic into one physical network. This may, however, cause issues with quality of service (QoS) requirements for the different types of traffic. Management traffic, for example, may require guaranteed delivery regardless of traffic conditions. Converged network interface devices may be utilized to perform protocol acceleration and protocol processing beyond OSI layer 2 and may require considerable computational power. Certain types of traffic such as clustering traffic may require low latency. Storage traffic, for example, may require efficient guaranteed delivery with varying bursty traffic loads. Some types of traffic such as critical networking traffic may require varying levels of prioritization, while other networking traffic may require best effort.
Clustering traffic may use proprietary or standardized clustering technologies. Storage traffic may use fibre channel, for example, while networking traffic may use Ethernet. In many cases, management traffic may utilize a separate out of band management network to guarantee delivery and avoid mixing it with the user Ethernet network. Each of these separate networks may be specifically designed to guarantee the quality of service required for the payload it carries so that there are no other traffic types with conflicting QoS requirements trying to share the same network. When consolidating all these networks over a single network that carries all traffic types, the converged network may provide similar QoS as guaranteed by the physically separate networks.
Computer networks comprise a plurality of interconnected networking devices, such as routers, switches and/or computers. The physical connection that allows one networking device to communicate with another networking, device is referred to as a link. Links may utilize wired or wireless communication technologies. Data may be communicated between networking devices via the link in groups of binary bits referred to as packets. The rate at which networking devices may communicate data via a link is referred to as link speed.
Demands for increasing link speeds and computing speeds have driven a variety of specialized computer networking architectures. There are networking architectures, such as Ethernet, which are widely utilized for communications based on the Internet Protocol (IP). There are other networking architectures, such as Fibre Channel, which are widely utilized in storage area network (SAN) architectures. Still other networking architectures are utilized in cluster computing architectures.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.